Meanwhile the high wind had sunk; the moon, after pushing her withered half to the zenith, was climbing the dusky edge, revealed fitfully; threads and wisps of thin vapour travelled along a falling gale, and branched from the dome of the sky in migratory broken lines, like wild birds shifting the order of flight, north and east, where the dawn sat in a web, but as yet had done no more than shoot up a glow along the central heavens, in amid the waves of deepened aloud: a mirror for night to see her dark self in her own hue. A shiver between the silent couple pricked their wits, and she said:
‘Chillon, shall we run out and call the morning?’
It was an old game of theirs, encouraged by their hearty father, to be out in the early hour on a rise of ground near the house and ‘call the morning.’ Her brother was glad of the challenge, and upon one of the yawns following a sleepless night, replied with a return to boyishness: ‘Yes, if you like. It’s the last time we shall do her the service here. Let’s go.’
They sprang up together and the bench fell behind them. Swinging the lantern he carried inconsiderately, the ring of it was left on his finger, and the end of candle rolled out of the crazy frame to the floor and was extinguished. Chillon had no match-box. He said to her:
‘What do you think of the window?--we’ve done it before, Carin. Better than groping down stairs and passages blocked with lumber.’
‘I’m ready,’ she said, and caught at her skirts by instinct to prove her readiness on the spot.
A drop of a dozen feet or so from the French window to a flower--bed was not very difficult. Her father had taught her how to jump, besides the how of many other practical things. She leaped as lightly as her brother, never touching earth with her hands; and rising from the proper contraction of the legs in taking the descent, she quoted her father: ‘Mean it when you’re doing it.’
‘For no enemy’s shot is equal to a weak heart in the act,’
Chillon pursued the quotation, laying his hand on her shoulder for a sign of approval. She looked up at him.
They passed down the garden and a sloping meadow to a brook swollen by heavy rains; over the brook on a narrow plank, and up a steep and stony pathway, almost a watercourse, between rocks, to another meadow, level with the house, that led ascending through a firwood; and there the change to thicker darkness told them light was abroad, though whether of the clouded moon or of the first grey of the quiet revolution was uncertain. Metallic light of a subterranean realm, it might have been thought.